I read something awhile back about how some of today's kids are saying they have it rough...WTF?The following philabuster is in response to that. And if those who are reading this have children in their teens this can be a rebutle for anything they bitch about.

When I was a child, my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and even the perverted neighbor down the street used to annoy me with their tedious rants about how hard things were when they were growing up; you know walking twenty-five miles to school every morning....uphill…no shoes…three feet of snow…

BOTH ways

You all know what I mean

I promised myself that when I grew up, I was not going to dump on them with a load of crap about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

I'm over the age of forty and I’m sorry I can't help but get frustrated when one of my kids questions how hard things are for them.

This may not pertain to everyone reading this and this is my first blog so bear with me…My kids and many others like them that are in their early to mid teens have got it too easy! Compared to my childhood, they live in paradise!

Yes, I have become one of those guys...

First of all…computers, I remember computers where things that were housed in large office buildings, and had many flashing lights and buttons. If you had one in your house you were rich. Keep in mind this is back in the mid to late 70’s. I don’t think I even had a friend whose family could afford a Commodore Vic 20 much less anything else. Yeah, they were about $300 a piece but this was in 1980. I know it’s all relative…but it did have an 8 bit system that came with a whopping 5 to 64 KB of memory...KILOBYTES! I don’t think you can purchase anything today that even operates with that…can you? If we wanted to remember something we stored information in notebooks (the kind you write in), and kept files of anything pertinent in filing cabinets. I still do that to some degree.

Next subject, the internet…If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves in the card catalog. If we were lucky, we could break out the Encyclopedia Britannica! And if you were like us who had a second hand set of these information bibles, you probably had a volume missing like us. I did love the way they smelled though. Now if I want to make a nice Gorgonzola sauce to put on a steak I just Google it, thank you Al Gore. I do actually love the web...a caption contest would be hard to do by yourself or over the phone.

Along the same lines of the internet …there was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter or postcard- with a pen! Writing letters wasn’t bad but the fact that it took nearly a week to ten days for the letter to get to the address, kind of made it anti-climatic; especially if you wrote something in anger and by the time they got the letter you were over whatever you were mad about.

Remember maps, I do and I still have a Road Atlas. I always thought of part of the vacation experience was not knowing how much further it was to get to the destination. Even in the age of GPS my kids still incessantly ask how much further or how much longer…I borrowed my brother in law’s Garmin to take on vacation to Orlando this summer and still managed to get lost. There is a reason why Rand-McNally is still in business.

There were no MP3’s or Napster! If you wanted to steal music, you had to go to the record store and shoplift it yourself! At least cassettes were much easier to lift than albums. I did enjoy making that cool “mix” tape for my girlfriend or the one to cruise around with. We had no CD players, remember those kids? We had tape decks in our cars and if you drove around in a hunk of shit Dodge Dart Swinger like me as my first car you had a broken 8 Track. Fast forward to your favorite song with your friends…awkward silence until you got it just right. My oldest daughter knows more about the Beatles than I did when I was her age and has every song by them thanks to I-Tunes.

There was no such thing as call waiting, caller ID, three way calling, call forward, or star 69. If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! When the phone rang you answered it. You picked it up and took your chances! Up to age 12 we only had rotary phones in our house. Have you ever tried to be the 10th caller on some radio station contest with a rotary phone? You would be hard pressed to find a cell phone that didn’t have some or all those features I mentioned above. My twelve year old daughter has unlimited texting…I prefer to pick up the phone and talk to someone thank you

Part of the reason I wrote this blog was because of the blog Jeffer wrote about old school video games. I won’t go into the obvious differences in video games from 30 years ago to today but I still love games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. You had to use your imagination. If I remember correctly you had one screen. The only difference from level to level was the speed at which shit came a you. The game just kept getting harder.

If you were fortunate enough to get TV Guide to find out what was on you were high class. Remote controls? Ha, you were the remote control, meaning you had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the channel! God forbid we had to move the TV to clean or for some other reason. I remember a certain Zenith that must have weighed at least 250 pounds. I was 13 OK, it seemed that heavy. Now some flat screens weigh less than 5 pounds and are not pieces of furniture. And as far as Cartoon Network goes, I have three words for you: Saturday Morning Cartoons. Unless you watched Zoom or Electric Company during the week, you had to wait all week for cartoons, you spoiled little shits.

We didn't have microwaves; if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove! Who would have ever imagined?

One other thing…if our parents whipped us we probably deserved it. No one called the cops.

OK I am finally off the soapbox! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1979 or before!

Oh, for the record, I do love my kids and hopefully their children's lives will be even easier than than they had. Let's hope so huh?